Electrical wiring is used in a wide variety of products. For example, a commercial transport aircraft may have many wire bundles extending through various parts of the aircraft structure. Each wire bundle may include multiple wires of the same or different length. In some examples, wire bundles in an aircraft may exceed 15 feet in length. The process of forming a wire bundle is labor intensive and may involve several process steps such as selecting wires of the appropriate gauge (e.g., diameter) and color (e.g., marking), and cutting each wire to the appropriate length. The process may additionally include taping together the wires on one or both ends of a wire bundle, or crimping an electrical contact on the wire ends and inserting each electrical contact into the appropriate opening in the body of an electrical connector.
For products having a large quantity of wire bundles, wire processing represents a significant portion of the overall production effort. In an attempt to reduce the amount of time required for forming wire bundles, automated wire processing machines have been developed to sequentially perform the above-mentioned steps. Although wire processing machines are effective in processing wire bundles of relatively short length (e.g., less than 3 feet), the processing of wire bundles of long length presents challenges. For example, long-length wires in a wire bundle may become entangled during processing and/or during removal of the wire bundle from the wire processing machine.
As can be seen, there exists a need in the art for a system and method for reducing wire entanglement of wires during automated wire processing.